[Bug 995144] Re: Grub2 Corrupts Hard Drive and Bad Design Causing failed boot.

[David F.]

If there is no partition starting at lba 63 (the normal location when
sectors per track is 63 for modern large hard drives) grub can use over
100 sectors (0-100) and maybe more.  The only "safe" area is within the
first track, however that isn't really safe as other specs such as gpt,
embr, certain attribute fields for Windows and some ibm structures
already use that area.  A kernel loader really belongs in a boot
partition by default, at least on PC architecture.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/995144

Title:
  Grub2 Corrupts Hard Drive and Bad Design Causing failed boot.

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  It's bad enough that the designers of various linux distros decided
  the default place for GRUB was the MBR instead of adhering to standard
  PC architecture practices (which all other OSes, including *nix
  version, followed), of putting the kernel loaders in the partition and
  making it active so standard code in the MBR would transfer control to
  it.  For cases where a volume was to boot it could have made the
  Extended partition active, put the start code in the EBR of the
  extended and have that boot the volume.    The Linux community would
  have a fit if MS decided it was going to write its own kernel loaders
  and stick them in the MBR and take over the disk.

  Anyway, now apparently whoever has taken over GRUB2 (latest version)
  has made some big mistakes and must not understand the standard pc
  architecture either.  Someone has made it write outside the first
  track of the hard drive if it doesn't think there is a partition
  there.

  1 - Writing outside the first track of the hard drive can corrupt
  partitions not in the MBR at the time which is common with various
  partitioning schemes and cause data loss for users.

  2 - Adding a partition to the start of the disk (cylinder aligned)
  afterwards would overwrite the part of GRUB written out beyond the
  first track making the entire system unbootable.

  3 - changing partition layouts can again overwrite GRUB data which
  should be in the partition by default.

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